Yes, exactly, what time do people think they have? It's here, it's now, it's happening, it's all around us. This headline would have made a little more sense ten years ago.
Magazines like The Economist helped bring us here by describing Oil Companies still has a bright future and a great investment in the 80s and 90s.
Instead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
This goes for almost every institution you can think of, save higher education and the field of climate science - and, even then, you can make an argument for lax funding and marketing on their part, in terms of overwhelming politicians and industry with the truth, no doubt at the behest of wealthy donors looking at their portfolios. But journalism, especially: essentially asleep at the wheel, when the gravity of the situation is considered. Too many people obsessed with their careers and with blinders on.
If you live in a western democracy your politicians are held very accountable to the opinion and will of the people who vote. They are not kings or inherited aristocracy, they do what the people want (roughly) or get voted out.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
If you live in a Western democracy your politicians are very accountable to media owners and corporate donors. Voters are a very long way down the influence list, because media owners and corporate donors have sophisticated and very expensive - but high ROI - ways to shape voter opinion.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate determine the winner.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
Here in America we love to blame the politicians (they do indeed suck). All the while voter turnout is a complete joke. Perhaps this is actually helpful, because we are rife with various subcultures that openly celebrate ignorance, so, yeah. Blame the shitty politicians, speak not of the ignorant and unbothered masses.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
There are more types of politics that national and international. Local, state/provincal, city, etc. The close it is to home the more you'll see the effects, and the more power you'll have. And the more directly the electorate can keep people accountable. But I think it's really throwing the baby out with the bathwater to declare that accountability is impossible, therefore there is no point in enagaging.
In my family, about 5 out of 100 people believe climate change is even real. So ya, I think the average at this point is "I'm ambivalent, climate change may not even be real. But mostly I don't care"
The poorest in society are the lowest CO2 emitters - they don't fly often, many don't own a car and use public transport - they can't afford meat in every meal.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
If you’re talking about a world democracy like the USA, the consumption gap between rich and poor effectively doesn’t matter from a climate change perspective. You could vanish the top 75% of Americans and still we’d have a climate change problem (albeit less of one for sure).
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
Because with the ozone layer, the causes of the problem were much more narrow, the solutions were orders of magnitude cheaper, and they affected a much smaller industry, much less dramatically.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
Yeah ditching cars is very hard in some places where public transport is not good. (US)
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
Saving the ozone layer required changing practices in a relatively small part of the economy (refrigeration, mostly). In 1994, the total cost of the transition in the US was estimated to less than $100 billion [1], about 1.3% of GDP ($7.3 trillion [2]).
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
> why is it that for the ozone layer we got together and undid the damage but for climate change we don't?
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one. Greta Thunberg and her "crazed lunatics" have caused massive damage? By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?
That is demonstrably false. Greta Thunberg only became famous in 2018. The world before 2018 was that world without "crazed lunatics", and things weren't any better than. Greta Thunberg got frustrated precisely because after all this time practically nothing was being done.
Also, exactly why do you call Greta a crazed lunatic? What has she done to deserve such a negative designation? What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.
> Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.
Funny how this same media brought Greta to limelight. If you want to kill the messenger at least realize that it is the one that gave Greta her popularity (for better or worse).
> What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Simple. Stayed out of news. Stayed in school and finished education instead of taking a gap year. The ones who should have been given coverage by media were the actual scientists who would have been taken seriously. Instead it turned into a big joke.
> By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?
Ofcourse there would have been. The World took scientists seriously when it came to ozone. It did take scientists seriously when it came to COVID even (though Fauci and co caused a lot of damage by becoming a political hack). There was absolutely no reason to assume people would not have taken climate change seriously if it was presented in the right manner.
> This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one
The very fact you are seeing it often recently should tell you that a lot of people feel that way. Irrespective of which side of the divide you are on, the messaging is lost if a issue as critical as climate change is hijacked by a bunch of teens who are not taken seriously by those in power. If you ask me, the politicians and media were more than happy to let Greta be the face of the movement. Think about the last sentence I said for a bit and you'll realize you have been played.
In all the decades before Greta Thunberg, all the scientists who warned the world about climate change were largely ignored. Almost nothing happened to fight climate change. Greta has been in the spotlights for less than a decade. And yet it's all her fault? That is completely preposterous.
> Simple. Stayed out of news. Stayed in school and finished education instead of taking a gap year.
Billions and billions of people did exactly that, and nothing happened.
> The ones who should have been given coverage by media should have been the actual scientists working on this crisis. They would have been taken seriously.
When would they have been taken seriously? They have been warning the world since at least the 1980's. How long do we have to wait?
> Think about the last sentence I said for a bit and you'll realize you have been played.
My opinion on climate change has not changed by the appearance of Greta Thunberg. It looks like you're the one who lets Greta's opinion and actions influence yours. Why do you let someone you seem dislike so much have that much power over you?
> Why do you let someone you seem dislike so much have that much power over you?
I don't dislike her. I am talking about her antics doing a disservice to something as serious as climate change. To the point where there is at least 50% of the World not believing in climate change and associating it with Greta and her antics. (also, when I say Greta I mean all the crazy lunatics like her... which includes fools gluing themselves to the streets, blocking roads used by common folk and splashing oil on paintings).
> When would they have been taken seriously? They have been warning the world since at least the 1980's. How long do we have to wait?
It was not pushed with same urgency as that of Ozone by the media. What was needed was putting a sense of urgency into the public through media without making it into a clown show.
> Billions and billions of people did exactly that, and nothing happened.
I am saying she should not have been the face of the movement. And yes she is one of billions and she should have stayed that way. Maybe excelled in some field that actually suits her. Instead of becoming a prop for politicians and media who love to have her face plastered everywhere as a caricature of climate change activists.
> In all the decades before Greta Thunberg, all the scientists who warned the world about climate change were largely ignored. Almost nothing happened to fight climate change. Greta has been in the spotlights for less than a decade. And yet it's all her fault? That is completely preposterous.
The scientists were not ignored. Their messages never reached the masses as the media did not spread it with the same urgency that was Ozone or heck even COVID. You did not need someone like Greta to make people realize dangers of COVID right? Most countries followed lockdown procedures. It only became an issue once Fauci and co started becoming partisan. Initial weeks of COVID lockdowns (wherever it was implemented) were extremely successful. You just need the same sense of urgency for climate change and that can only happen through media and the right set of scientists. Take the Nepal disaster as an example of effects of climate change. How is the media portraying it? AS some natural disaster. Very few outlets are directly linking it to climate change.
> It looks like you're the one who lets Greta's opinion and actions influence yours.
My opinion on climate change is exactly that of Greta's. However, I know what I am. I am not a scientist. Much less a climate scientist. So I won't go on media claiming to be a representative of the movement and causing mayhem. I can at max educate the people around me to the dangers of climate change. But I won't make a fool of myself publicly by speaking on a topic that I have only cursory knowledge of.
> My opinion on climate change has not changed by the appearance of Greta Thunberg.
You are not the target audience. It is the remaining 50+% people who do not believe in climate change and think it is some grand conspiracy who need convincing. And they can never be convinced by a clown like Greta.
Was an industry really hurt by the actions needed to rebuild the ozone layer? I don’t think so, at least not as far as I can remember. On the other hand the fossil fuel industry has an insane amount of control over politics since a century or so?
1. The damage was understood, fairly easily measured, and could be done repeatably.
2. The cause was widely agreed upon.
3. Solutions weren't predicated on massive societal change.
4. Compliance was fairly easy to track and enforce.
Climate change is lacking all of these to various degrees.
I recognize this is deeply cynical and definitely doomerist. What can I as an individual actually do to stop this? Why should I even bother reading articles like this at this point? I can't do anything. I can't action it. I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
Even without the possibility of solving the problem, individuals can still choose to stop contributing to it. You might feel better about the whole thing at the very least. As an added bonus, the more people that choose to stop contributing, the easier it becomes for others to do the same (e.g. less driving --> more cyclists and pedestrians --> better cycling and pedestrian environment).
> What can I as an individual actually do to stop this?
- vote for people who care
- reduce your own CO2 emissions (air traveling, meat consumption, electronic gadgets, textiles...)
It's not going to change anything but at least you can feel that you've done your share and that you're not a part of the problem.
There are three types of people
1. people who just don't care or think that their lifestyle isn't negotiable (this includes people who are in denial, or uninformed, or techno-solutionists)
2. people who care but who blame someone else
3. those who try to do their share
Third category is extremely slim. I have a few colleagues for instance who refuse to fly, don't eat meat. They aren't activist of any sort but just try to do their share even though it's useless. I find that pretty respectable.
There's very little to do in Europe. South Korea, Iran, Thailand, Egypt or South Africa e.g. put out significantly more CO2 than say the UK or France (which are towards the top). India and China are higher than the whole EU and are only continuing to pollute more as their standards of living improve. Essentially the only way to stop it is to keep the 3rd world impoverished (in Africa, people often argue that green energy is a Western conspiracy to keep them down). Western economies have already largely stagnated and most of Europe's pollution's fallen to lower per capita than China, let alone South Korea or Russia or... Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and such.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
People got together and got us all to stop smoking cigarettes against the same kind of opposition. Probably individuals can get together, help educate others which will eventually drive changes through voting or force businesses to change
> I can collect my recycling, pop solar panels on my roof and be the most carbon footprint conscious person and it wouldn't move the needle an atom's width.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
There is nothing you can do as an individual, unfortunately. You can reduce your own impact, that’s something that personally makes me feel better and I would highly recommend (vegetarianism is the simplest way to do so). And if you’re motivated you can join advocacy or activist groups. But it’s a collective issue, individual have no actual power here. We need to act as a group to make meaningful changes.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
Focus on the missing prerequisites that are critical for any viable solution. It doesn't matter what anyone does if we literally lack the technical infrastructure required to make a meaningful difference. The first step is making it at least possible.
For example, halting the increase in atmospheric CO2, never mind reversing it, requires an astronomical amount of new clean energy far beyond what we produce today from all sources, clean or dirty. If we were serious about this we'd be building countless terawatts of new carbon-free electrical production as fast as possible instead of letting NIMBYs and activists bury these for decades in lawsuits and paperwork.
The infrastructure modernization that needs to happen will be economically impossible as long as it primarily exists as a mechanism for corruption, graft, and rent-seeking e.g. California's high-speed rail. Even if we had the political will, we literally couldn't afford it unless it became radically more efficient. Letting political constituencies hijack every building project so they can smuggle in unrelated agendas is something that is fundamentally at odds with addressing climate change in a serious way. That's a choice.
If we don't solve these two problems then anything else we do as individuals won't matter. Being able to address climate change in a meaningful way is downstream of these two challenges.
An contrasting addendum: Most causal chains^H roots are deep and hairy, and most roles are supporting roles, rather than a principal with clear story impact. That friend who forwarded Ansary's email onward.
So maybe your question prompts some response here, which the author or someone then improves upon when this topic rolls around again, which someday affects a list Claude generates when someone asks it to aggregate "What can I do?" ideas from the web, which ... who knows? But better the question was asked than not. And better the responses are novel and insightful and compelling, than not. And better our discussion here refines those ideas, than not. No?
"Better", in some hopeful but poorly-instrumented fuzzy-metric sense. Which is a difficulty. Whether it's worth the opportunity cost of however else you might be spending your time this evening... perhaps better this topic/thread, than at least some others?
I know what definitely won't work: Luigi Mangione style action. That will only set people up against one another.
Here's two stories that might inspire:
- I've seen a desperate, fragile grandfather seriously contemplate peaceful Gandhi style sit-ins targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, "so my grandchildren would know I at least tried".
- I've seen a couple radically cut their consumption of about everything. "Taking good care of the earth is a tenet of our religious views. We're realistic enough to realise our efforts won't help anyone directly, but perhaps it might inspire others."
Getting more noses worldwide pointing in the same direction could perhaps make a sliver of difference. The tricky bit will be getting specific groups on board. I can think of a few challenging ones:
- the downtrodden struggling for survival as it is already. They have other priorities, like food on the table.
- those outside liberal democracies (93% of the world!) in a position to bring change. They have to count with sociopaths with little accountability in charge.
- those that won't make a noise because historical experience has taught them to shut up.
- those with too little education/intelligence/eagerness to understand. They will require simple stories and example behaviour/idols/heroes to copy.
Nature's alarm signals itself will induce some fear. That will be the best publicity for change.
I’m not sure: when I was in high school / university it was well understood that places like Florida would be under water and unlivable by now.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
> Up to 70% of residents between North Carolina and Florida, and a trillion dollars in property, could be impacted by the end of the century with just over three feet of sea rise. South Florida represents the vast majority of that risk, with about 7.5 million people and $750 billion dollars in property expected to face increasing risks as groundwaters rise, the study found.
Thwaites Glacier and the glaciers locked behind it are predicted to raise sea levels by 3 metres in the next 50 years. And that's just one source -- it doesn't include Greenland's glaciers, other parts of Antarctica, and the expansion effect of warming the ocean water.
Florida is particularly vulnerable because it's porous. We could build sea walls around NYC to protect it, but that wouldn't work well for Florida.
The title has that generic alarmist flavor, but the article is rather sensible: persistent anticyclones may form every summer, such as one over Europe, leading to regular droughts and perhaps an urgent need for desalination plants. The message is to be ready to build infrastructure like that, if this seems to be happening.
We're already cooked, the Paris Agreement was aiming for avoiding 1.5°C global increase by 2030 and we're pretty much at that now. We're already seeing global weather shifts as the beginning of what appears to be rapid climate change and we're not yet at the peak of carbon output.
Birth rates are in decline. The global population is estimated to peak in the 2080s. I suspect that could be later than reality as the endless doom (like this article) inspires more and more people to not have kids. Then as the population declines precipitously, nature takes back over and begins resolving the problem itself.
Population decline will not solve climate change, we already passed multiple points of no return that will result in worsening climate for the next 50-100y. And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
> And there won’t be a way to roll back those changes
It's possible to sequester CO2, and here are a couple ways.
1. Use permaculture or regenerative agriculture to aggressively increase SOM (soil organic matter) / carbon content of the soil. Typical degraded farmland is around 1.5% SOM. For every 0.1% increase per acre, roughly 1 ton of carbon is sequestered. Setting an ambitious increase to 10% would take decades but would increase yields along the way. There are billions of acres of farmland, so a lot of carbon can be removed from the biosphere. Additionally, since people naively mimic farmers for home gardening etc., if farmers were part of the solution, then more home growers would be, too. With a couple decades of regenerative ag you can go from 1.5% to 7.5%, but with more time and motivation you can go higher.
2. Research and then put into practice industrial-scale pyrolysis for energy generation. So, instead of burning methane (aka "natural gas") to boil water to spin a turbine, we could pyrolysize organic material to emit and burn syngas to boil water to spin a turbine. The resulting biochar can be co-composted and when finished, used as a soil amendment.
With a different mindset a lot can change, and quickly.
Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough. Ecosystems are connected systems and can be resilient in the long term, but a domino can fall that has a huge, negative impact on everything downstream.
For example, coral reefs provide protection and a vibrant home for a lot of sea life. But when the water gets a couple degrees too warm, it can essentially die, and when it does, the rest of the ecosystem disappears too.
Imagine if you were a human and your body temp was even a couple degrees above normal. You’d have a fever.
And these are only tiny examples… life finds away, but it also needs time to grow back.
> Not saying you’re wrong, but sequestering CO2 probably isn’t enough.
My comment was in response to someone suggesting or implying that nothing can be done, not that the 2 points I made were enough.
I agree with you, especially about the ocean. The oceans have absorbed an enormous amount of CO2, increasing ocean acidity and killing ecosystems not even including the heat they've absorbed, also killing ecosystems. Meanwhile commercial fisherman (aqua farmers) are literally bombing coral as a fishing "method." We need an international effort at changing the people who do farming because the people we have are the worst we can get and they do an enormous amount of harm at basically all levels. Besides the ecological harm, they're just so bad at their jobs that despite selling one of only 3 products humans can't live without, they still can't stay in business without bailouts so routine they don't even consciously recognize them as such.
We need a lot less naysaying and a lot more concrete plans led by people who have successfully done it. I've already done the 2 things I mentioned (soil carbon, biochar) on the scale that is available to me. Additionally our rooftop solar covers maybe 1/3 of the roof and produces 2-3x our annual usage in an all-electric house. We're freegan. My used EV burns no fossil fuel. We compost aggressively including toilet material and make biochar which we co-compost. We have a xeriscape garden and use an amount of water most people would probably consider impossibly low. This is all with a mindset of continuous improvement, always assuming that more gains are yet to be discovered and put into practice. Anyone can adopt this mindset. If anyone thinks the above is way too much for you, I started it all just by switching the incandescent light bulbs in my house to LEDs. That was the first step, and then I took another, and then another. That's all. And we're saving a ludicrous amount of money but that's not the only reason we're doing it, and wasn't the original motivation.
In my own veg garden, I have noticed that my soil quality starts degrading around >6% of carbon contents.
It wasn't a problem until recently, but with all the droughts in recent years, too high carbon can make it hydrophobic and lead to water run-off that happens too quick once it has entirely dried out. I.e. it becomes too lose/aereated. This then means that the occasional heat storm no longer replenishes water reserves and you end up a bit wirh the same problem as if you had 1% Carbon.
My soil is still way more resilient at the beginning of the drought (I can easily cover 1mo eithout rain without having to water most crops, except some smaller spices). But in recent times I have stopped mulching for a while.
Discussion is pointless . -All- of it. Germany has reduced emissions by what, 20% ? It costs its world industrial leadership . No AI to power by electricity . And Germany has 3% of world CO2 output . Meanwhile , China emissions exploding almost exponentially , as they produce all the good and bad things for you .
The number of people on HN who believe in the religion of climatism is irrefutable proof that IQ does not go hand in hand with good judgment. There is no evidence whatsoever that so-called global warming is caused by humans. And even if it is, there is no evidence that it constitutes any serious problem. I'm sure the same people who believe in climatism were lining up to get injected with an experimental vaccine. Human stupidity knows no bounds.
Less time to do what precisely? Prevent China from emitting 10 times more CO2 than the rest of the world combined? Good luck with that, meanwhile the West leads millions of people into poverty to pursue a strategy that will not make a dent in climate change if it is caused by CO2.
The globe couldnt afford a couple of massive energy consumers (USA and Europe) let alone three more (China, India and Africa). Total climate change is almost 100% sure, there is no return. Even if Renewables or EVs reach a pesky 30% in limited areas, CO2 levels will not care.
105 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 18.5 ms ] threadInstead if they had authored high profile articles about how fossil fuels are driving this world to disaster, maybe we would be in a better place.
Doing that would have made their advertisers mad, so they kept writing about clean coal and oil for better $. It was the exact same with politicians, they did not want to loose most of their bribes (ie: political contributions) so they hid their head in the sand.
So now this magazine is writing articles about Climate Change, no thanks.
The people who vote by-and-large don't believe climate change is real, don't believe it is serious, or are not willing to tolerate the level of discomfort necessary to solve the problem.
At least in my country, politician's hands are completely utterly tied from fighting climate change, because if they do something serious enough to actually matter they will immediately be voted out of office and whatever they did rolled back.
Some are simple censorship - like X and FB throttling the reach of unwanted content and promoting the reach of the opposite.
Others appear believably organic.
The obvious ones are crude, but they still work on huge swathes of the population.
The first step to recovery is to accept that this is how the system really works, and the idea that voters pick leaders based on a rational consideration of their record and potential benefits is absolute fantasy.
Proportional elections have different dynamics, especially if elected candidates are determined by personal votes (and not by predetermined ranks on the party list). A successful politician mostly needs to find a niche and maintain their visibility and support within that niche.
To be fair, the US electoral system is designed to discourage or outright disenfranchise most voters:
* First-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections ensure that anyone who isn't living in a swing state/district may as well not bother.
* Heavy gerrymandering exacerbates this effect.
* Voter suppression tactics like attacking mail-in ballots and closing voting locations makes it more difficult for those people who still want to vote. Note that Voter ID laws are included in this because there still live today people who were denied birth certificates due to segregation-era hospitals refusing non-white mothers delivery care.
* Holding elections on non-holiday weekdays makes it harder for those living paycheck-to-paycheck and working hourly jobs, though this is blunted somewhat by states which allow early voting.
1. Don't do anything that might interfere with our profits, time is available/needed to consider what to do.
2. Don't do anything that might interfere with out profits, it's too late anyway.
Conversely, the wealthiest are frequent flyers, are chauffeured about in SUVs and rarely walk. They're preaching to the poor guy about what he needs to do to stop climate change.
Even if the poor guy wanted to care, he can't do much, but the people who claim to care could do a lot more, if they really did care.
People get confused by some of the research because it often publishes emissions by who owns the asset emitting and not who consumes it (eg Starr et al paper breaks down both, and consumption vs ownership is wildly different, and you can tell what bent people have by which number they pick to report on…)
Another way I’d put it: if you’re not ready for gas to be $40/gallon and beef to be $100/lb ground, then you’re not really ready to fight climate change. And no one is, so it’s not going to happen unless we get a technology miracle.
Lots of things are wealth gap problems. Climate change is not, it’s an everyone problem.
We might not stop what is already happening or what will happen, but we still have time to make it less severe than it would be if no action would be made.
We still can save lives, not all of them but some and for this people it will make a difference.
Keeping with the "this is surprising" narrative, or like this title, implying that we have any time at all, is not helping.
I would expect a less naive title from a platform like the economist.
is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Global warming fix requires basically banning most of airline travel, phasing out the meat industry, and other massive life changes. And people would rather enjoy the lives themselves instead of giving a fuck about the planet they leave for future generations.
It's a very different situation with fossil fuels.
Because it also happened to be profitable for a large company (DuPont), which was also the company largely responsible for the whole ozone layer thing. They lobbied against ozone layer protections while they had a patent on Freon, but as soon as it expired, they came up with a new more expensive alternative and started supporting environmental regulations forcing people to switch to the new one.
It’s not that the changes are “too damaging to the economy,” it’s that they’d need to be much more widespread. For example, everyone should have stopped driving gasoline engine cars at least by 2010, when the scientific evidence had already been undeniable for years, for anyone studying the matter in good faith. No such action was needed to deal with the ozone layer.
Compounding the problem for climate change mitigation is that it threatens the wealth of people in the oil, gas, and related industries. Changing refrigerant type for ozone hole mitigation was not an existential threat to any industry. The fossil fuel industry has plowed billions of dollars into propaganda and political influence to prevent or slow down changes.
But I am seeing that it's not that hopeless by 2030 43% of energy would come from renewable sources like solar. Maybe there's still hope. It would be profoundly stupid if as a species we died off because we couldn't curb CO2 emissions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion_and_climate_ch...
For the ozone layer, it was deemed possible to eliminate (or significantly reduce) certain chemical emissions.
For generalised climate change, the common enemy of all people is the transnational petroleum industry. This corporate alliance will topple democracies rather than reduce its profits and influence.
Reducing global carbon emissions to reach net zero by 2050 has been estimated to cost $9.2 trillion per year [3]. World GDP is currently $126 trillion [4]. That means 7.3% of current world GDP per year, or 1.8x of it over a quarter century.
[1] https://cei.org/studies/the-high-cost-of-cool-the-economic-i...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[3] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-ins...
[4] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/NGDPD@WEO/OEMDC/ADVE...
If you want the honest, brutal take it is because I remember, at least in my country, that for the ozone stuff there was a lot of scientific people taking lead roles in educating the masses. Especially those with credibility who were otherwise not media savvy.
Climate change on the other hand, whenever I think about the words, I can only get Greta Thunberg and her antics in my mind. Even for someone who believes in climate change I can't help but feel these crazed lunatics have only caused massive damage to what should have otherwise been a wake up call. It is like how COVID got associated with Fauci and Gain-of-function.
> is it too politicized, are the required changes too damaging to the economy to start agressively implementing them?
Ofcourse it was politicized. It became a party vs party, an ideology vs ideology thing. Science took a backseat.
That is demonstrably false. Greta Thunberg only became famous in 2018. The world before 2018 was that world without "crazed lunatics", and things weren't any better than. Greta Thunberg got frustrated precisely because after all this time practically nothing was being done.
Also, exactly why do you call Greta a crazed lunatic? What has she done to deserve such a negative designation? What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Also also, lots and lots of scientists have been telling the world about climate change, just as scientists did regarding ozone. It's just that the media or politicians or the industry or whoever decided their reports were inconvenient and they got largely ignored.
Funny how this same media brought Greta to limelight. If you want to kill the messenger at least realize that it is the one that gave Greta her popularity (for better or worse).
> What could she have done that in your eyes would have made a positive impact?
Simple. Stayed out of news. Stayed in school and finished education instead of taking a gap year. The ones who should have been given coverage by media were the actual scientists who would have been taken seriously. Instead it turned into a big joke.
> By that do you mean that in a world without them, there would be much more efforts to fight climate change?
Ofcourse there would have been. The World took scientists seriously when it came to ozone. It did take scientists seriously when it came to COVID even (though Fauci and co caused a lot of damage by becoming a political hack). There was absolutely no reason to assume people would not have taken climate change seriously if it was presented in the right manner.
> This is a take I often see recently, and it such a weird one
The very fact you are seeing it often recently should tell you that a lot of people feel that way. Irrespective of which side of the divide you are on, the messaging is lost if a issue as critical as climate change is hijacked by a bunch of teens who are not taken seriously by those in power. If you ask me, the politicians and media were more than happy to let Greta be the face of the movement. Think about the last sentence I said for a bit and you'll realize you have been played.
> Simple. Stayed out of news. Stayed in school and finished education instead of taking a gap year.
Billions and billions of people did exactly that, and nothing happened.
> The ones who should have been given coverage by media should have been the actual scientists working on this crisis. They would have been taken seriously.
When would they have been taken seriously? They have been warning the world since at least the 1980's. How long do we have to wait?
> Think about the last sentence I said for a bit and you'll realize you have been played.
My opinion on climate change has not changed by the appearance of Greta Thunberg. It looks like you're the one who lets Greta's opinion and actions influence yours. Why do you let someone you seem dislike so much have that much power over you?
I don't dislike her. I am talking about her antics doing a disservice to something as serious as climate change. To the point where there is at least 50% of the World not believing in climate change and associating it with Greta and her antics. (also, when I say Greta I mean all the crazy lunatics like her... which includes fools gluing themselves to the streets, blocking roads used by common folk and splashing oil on paintings).
> When would they have been taken seriously? They have been warning the world since at least the 1980's. How long do we have to wait?
It was not pushed with same urgency as that of Ozone by the media. What was needed was putting a sense of urgency into the public through media without making it into a clown show.
> Billions and billions of people did exactly that, and nothing happened.
I am saying she should not have been the face of the movement. And yes she is one of billions and she should have stayed that way. Maybe excelled in some field that actually suits her. Instead of becoming a prop for politicians and media who love to have her face plastered everywhere as a caricature of climate change activists.
> In all the decades before Greta Thunberg, all the scientists who warned the world about climate change were largely ignored. Almost nothing happened to fight climate change. Greta has been in the spotlights for less than a decade. And yet it's all her fault? That is completely preposterous.
The scientists were not ignored. Their messages never reached the masses as the media did not spread it with the same urgency that was Ozone or heck even COVID. You did not need someone like Greta to make people realize dangers of COVID right? Most countries followed lockdown procedures. It only became an issue once Fauci and co started becoming partisan. Initial weeks of COVID lockdowns (wherever it was implemented) were extremely successful. You just need the same sense of urgency for climate change and that can only happen through media and the right set of scientists. Take the Nepal disaster as an example of effects of climate change. How is the media portraying it? AS some natural disaster. Very few outlets are directly linking it to climate change.
> It looks like you're the one who lets Greta's opinion and actions influence yours.
My opinion on climate change is exactly that of Greta's. However, I know what I am. I am not a scientist. Much less a climate scientist. So I won't go on media claiming to be a representative of the movement and causing mayhem. I can at max educate the people around me to the dangers of climate change. But I won't make a fool of myself publicly by speaking on a topic that I have only cursory knowledge of.
> My opinion on climate change has not changed by the appearance of Greta Thunberg.
You are not the target audience. It is the remaining 50+% people who do not believe in climate change and think it is some grand conspiracy who need convincing. And they can never be convinced by a clown like Greta.
Climate change is lacking all of these to various degrees.
Politicians don't care, and the ones that do can't make a difference either. Corporations definitely don't care. I can go protest, and that gets a lot of media attention but it doesn't change a voter's mind when their main concern is who gets to play in school sports.
I know this is vitriolic, but I am genuinely curious about it. What can I do? What can I do outside of putting my ballot in the box and hoping something changes?
You've never been responsible for the entire world, that's a defeatist fiction put on your shoulders by people who want you to give up and not take responsibility for your actions.
Take some real time to think about your own actions, your share of the blame. Then begin the process of improving your actions. As a handy benefit, you'll begin saving money, and you can reinvest the savings into more projects that also save money. Eventually your carbon footprint will be a small fraction of what it was and in its place you'll have a pile of money.
- vote for people who care
- reduce your own CO2 emissions (air traveling, meat consumption, electronic gadgets, textiles...)
It's not going to change anything but at least you can feel that you've done your share and that you're not a part of the problem.
There are three types of people
1. people who just don't care or think that their lifestyle isn't negotiable (this includes people who are in denial, or uninformed, or techno-solutionists)
2. people who care but who blame someone else
3. those who try to do their share
Third category is extremely slim. I have a few colleagues for instance who refuse to fly, don't eat meat. They aren't activist of any sort but just try to do their share even though it's useless. I find that pretty respectable.
Pro-nuclear efforts are the best hope we have: generate enough electricity and we can scrape the atmosphere clean
This entire mentality of "but them" is bad.
Plenty to do. We don’t have oil or natural gas so relying on fossil fuel to power our economy is stupid.
The more people who do that, the faster the needle moves. You create economic incentives for businesses to cater to you, and you set an example for others to follow.
That's why I only buy electric cars, put solar on my roof, and heat with a heat pump. A few years later, my parents put in a heat pump, and an extended family member (who is a denier) also put in a heat pump.
Though, obviously do not vote for the pro fossil fuel parties (which is pretty much all right wing parties in the west)
Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.
I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.
Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.
Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...
"What I can do to achieve world peace today"
For example, halting the increase in atmospheric CO2, never mind reversing it, requires an astronomical amount of new clean energy far beyond what we produce today from all sources, clean or dirty. If we were serious about this we'd be building countless terawatts of new carbon-free electrical production as fast as possible instead of letting NIMBYs and activists bury these for decades in lawsuits and paperwork.
The infrastructure modernization that needs to happen will be economically impossible as long as it primarily exists as a mechanism for corruption, graft, and rent-seeking e.g. California's high-speed rail. Even if we had the political will, we literally couldn't afford it unless it became radically more efficient. Letting political constituencies hijack every building project so they can smuggle in unrelated agendas is something that is fundamentally at odds with addressing climate change in a serious way. That's a choice.
If we don't solve these two problems then anything else we do as individuals won't matter. Being able to address climate change in a meaningful way is downstream of these two challenges.
So maybe your question prompts some response here, which the author or someone then improves upon when this topic rolls around again, which someday affects a list Claude generates when someone asks it to aggregate "What can I do?" ideas from the web, which ... who knows? But better the question was asked than not. And better the responses are novel and insightful and compelling, than not. And better our discussion here refines those ideas, than not. No?
"Better", in some hopeful but poorly-instrumented fuzzy-metric sense. Which is a difficulty. Whether it's worth the opportunity cost of however else you might be spending your time this evening... perhaps better this topic/thread, than at least some others?
Here's two stories that might inspire:
- I've seen a desperate, fragile grandfather seriously contemplate peaceful Gandhi style sit-ins targeting fossil fuel infrastructure, "so my grandchildren would know I at least tried".
- I've seen a couple radically cut their consumption of about everything. "Taking good care of the earth is a tenet of our religious views. We're realistic enough to realise our efforts won't help anyone directly, but perhaps it might inspire others."
Getting more noses worldwide pointing in the same direction could perhaps make a sliver of difference. The tricky bit will be getting specific groups on board. I can think of a few challenging ones:
- the downtrodden struggling for survival as it is already. They have other priorities, like food on the table.
- those outside liberal democracies (93% of the world!) in a position to bring change. They have to count with sociopaths with little accountability in charge.
- those that won't make a noise because historical experience has taught them to shut up.
- those with too little education/intelligence/eagerness to understand. They will require simple stories and example behaviour/idols/heroes to copy.
Nature's alarm signals itself will induce some fear. That will be the best publicity for change.
Instead, I have tried to relax and to enjoy the company I am going down the slide with.
To quote Vonnegut, “There's only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you've got to be kind.ʼ”
We can still do that.
Already then you could find this exact article title in a dozen publications per year, especially in academic publications. Al Gore made a third career out of it.
It was alarmist and too soon then but it’s not alarmist and too soon now?
Nobody upvotes an article titled “Things are about 0.5% more concerning than they were two decades ago”
This doesn't seem plausible - the worst-case predictions for sea level rise by the end of the century are around 2m.
That would certainly be bad for Florida, but like 80% of the population lives higher than 2m above sea level, so it certainly wouldn't be unliveable.
Florida's homeowners insurance industry has largely collapsed in recent years.
Rising sea levels can impact fresh water supplies (https://www.wusf.org/weather/2024-11-27/trillion-dollar-hidd...).
> Up to 70% of residents between North Carolina and Florida, and a trillion dollars in property, could be impacted by the end of the century with just over three feet of sea rise. South Florida represents the vast majority of that risk, with about 7.5 million people and $750 billion dollars in property expected to face increasing risks as groundwaters rise, the study found.
Power failures get scarier in high temp, high humidity scenarios, too. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature)
Florida is particularly vulnerable because it's porous. We could build sea walls around NYC to protect it, but that wouldn't work well for Florida.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5wB2ur1S2w
Nobody was claiming that Florida would be under water by 2026. You just made up an hyperbolic claim and attributed it to academics to discredit them.
It's possible to sequester CO2, and here are a couple ways.
1. Use permaculture or regenerative agriculture to aggressively increase SOM (soil organic matter) / carbon content of the soil. Typical degraded farmland is around 1.5% SOM. For every 0.1% increase per acre, roughly 1 ton of carbon is sequestered. Setting an ambitious increase to 10% would take decades but would increase yields along the way. There are billions of acres of farmland, so a lot of carbon can be removed from the biosphere. Additionally, since people naively mimic farmers for home gardening etc., if farmers were part of the solution, then more home growers would be, too. With a couple decades of regenerative ag you can go from 1.5% to 7.5%, but with more time and motivation you can go higher.
2. Research and then put into practice industrial-scale pyrolysis for energy generation. So, instead of burning methane (aka "natural gas") to boil water to spin a turbine, we could pyrolysize organic material to emit and burn syngas to boil water to spin a turbine. The resulting biochar can be co-composted and when finished, used as a soil amendment.
With a different mindset a lot can change, and quickly.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-emit-much-...
Sure we can say the rich peoples businesses make the mess but their efforts are broadly consumed
For example, coral reefs provide protection and a vibrant home for a lot of sea life. But when the water gets a couple degrees too warm, it can essentially die, and when it does, the rest of the ecosystem disappears too.
Imagine if you were a human and your body temp was even a couple degrees above normal. You’d have a fever.
And these are only tiny examples… life finds away, but it also needs time to grow back.
My comment was in response to someone suggesting or implying that nothing can be done, not that the 2 points I made were enough.
I agree with you, especially about the ocean. The oceans have absorbed an enormous amount of CO2, increasing ocean acidity and killing ecosystems not even including the heat they've absorbed, also killing ecosystems. Meanwhile commercial fisherman (aqua farmers) are literally bombing coral as a fishing "method." We need an international effort at changing the people who do farming because the people we have are the worst we can get and they do an enormous amount of harm at basically all levels. Besides the ecological harm, they're just so bad at their jobs that despite selling one of only 3 products humans can't live without, they still can't stay in business without bailouts so routine they don't even consciously recognize them as such.
We need a lot less naysaying and a lot more concrete plans led by people who have successfully done it. I've already done the 2 things I mentioned (soil carbon, biochar) on the scale that is available to me. Additionally our rooftop solar covers maybe 1/3 of the roof and produces 2-3x our annual usage in an all-electric house. We're freegan. My used EV burns no fossil fuel. We compost aggressively including toilet material and make biochar which we co-compost. We have a xeriscape garden and use an amount of water most people would probably consider impossibly low. This is all with a mindset of continuous improvement, always assuming that more gains are yet to be discovered and put into practice. Anyone can adopt this mindset. If anyone thinks the above is way too much for you, I started it all just by switching the incandescent light bulbs in my house to LEDs. That was the first step, and then I took another, and then another. That's all. And we're saving a ludicrous amount of money but that's not the only reason we're doing it, and wasn't the original motivation.
It wasn't a problem until recently, but with all the droughts in recent years, too high carbon can make it hydrophobic and lead to water run-off that happens too quick once it has entirely dried out. I.e. it becomes too lose/aereated. This then means that the occasional heat storm no longer replenishes water reserves and you end up a bit wirh the same problem as if you had 1% Carbon.
My soil is still way more resilient at the beginning of the drought (I can easily cover 1mo eithout rain without having to water most crops, except some smaller spices). But in recent times I have stopped mulching for a while.
Paywall free link